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Jinger Duggar wears pants these days. But she didn’t always.
While discussing the outrageous family rules that made her family famous (while distracting from worse things), it is only natural that pants-wearing would come up.
Jinger was so heavily indoctrinated by her cult’s rules on “modesty” that she couldn’t understand when some of her friends wore pants instead of baggy skirts.
In fact, she remembers a time when she wept over it.
Jinger Duggar wept when her close childhood friends wore pants
During the Wednesday, April 16 episode of The Jeremy & Jinger Podcast, Jinger Duggar delved into her beliefs about pants, skirts, and “modesty.”
Within the fundamentalist purity culture of the cult in which she grew up,
Though there was some exaggeration for the cameras when the infamous family was on TLC, the sexist restrictions on women and girls were still very real.
So, Jinger recalled during the recent podcast episode, when some of her friends began to wear pants, it came as a shock.
“I remember when a couple close friends started wearing pants and I was so broken-hearted over it,” she admitted.
“I remember crying over one friend just thinking, ‘Why are they doing that?’” Jinger confessed.
She added that, in retrospect, she reacted this way: “Without even asking or hearing them out as to why.”
Over time, her attitude began to change
“You kind of start to not think twice about it,” Jinger explained.
That is, you don’t reconsider your position “until you are surrounded with other people who are conducting their lives differently.”
Jinger added: “And then that’s something where you start to think more about, ‘OK, why do I do what I do?’”
This is where Joy-Anna Duggar chimed in.
Joy mentioned that she started wearing pants two years ago, and reached a similar conclusion to her sister’s.
“To me, it was a big deal when somebody that always wore skirts started wearing pants,” she recalled.
Joy continued: “Then I was like, ‘Oh, well they know better.’ That was my attitude behind it.”
What broke the cultist mindset for them?
More than once, Duggar daughters have pointed to re-reading of biblical passages to explain why they no longer keep to IBLP rules that dominated their childhoods.
However, from their own words, it sounds like something a little more organic: when you’re isolated and surrounded by people who are just like you, everything else can seem a little scary.
When you meet other people in the world, differences stop being so scary.
That is the same phenomenon that has some parents convinced that college “indoctrinate” their adult children.
The reality, of course, is that meeting people with different beliefs, lifestyles, and backgrounds is eye-opening — and leads people to reexamine their own beliefs, biases, and habits.
And, sometimes, they end up wearing a pair of jeans.
Jinger Duggar Recalls Life Under Cult ‘Modesty’ Rules: I Cried When My … was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.
